RDH - Global Warming: The Solution Is So Easy That It's Amazing

Global Warming: The Solution Is So Easy That It’s Amazing

February 6, 2007

There will be no jokey floating text box in this essay. For one thing, aside from possible differences of opinion over what, for example, constitutes an excellent high-mileage automobile, this time there's no credible or serious rebuttal to what I have to say.

I no longer follow the news on global warming. I prefer to think that the predictions must be wrong and that in fact we can look forward, over the coming decades, to a gradually cooling planet with a somewhat reduced population of human beings, all of whom live in huge houses, some of them Victorian. The news these days seems to indicate the opposite scenario, so I tend to ignore it.

Nonetheless, I've decided to take some time out from my normally sheltered mental life to offer solutions to the problem.

First, Outlaw All Crap, Starting with Cheap Crap

I am, of course, referring to the imitation things—the non-things—that so many of us have seen not only at so-called dollar stores but also in the toy sections and checkout aisles at places like Target and Wal-Mart. That stuff appeals mostly to children because it's available for purchase at a price that is often below a parent's threshold for giving in to incessant begging. But children don't know what they want, and parents shouldn't let them spend their money. Kids under a certain age have almost no life experience and therefore no idea what's good and what's bad. But that's why we have dollar stores, because ever since the postwar boom, children have run amok with dollars in their hands. It may be only a dollar, but that doesn't make it okay. Multiply those "cute" fake plastic things times a billion and suddenly they're not only less cute but they're wrecking the landscape and encouraging a nineteenth-century form of industrial expansion in every corner of a once-beautiful planet.

Use your imagination and your authority. Next time your child wants a fake, battery-operated mobile phone, take two hairbrushes and practice placing calls to each other. If your kids says that's lame, say, "Honey, we* can't afford to buy you a cheap, fake 'telephone'. How about another piano lesson on our restored baby grand piano, the one we bought with the money that we saved from never, ever buying things that weren't really things?"

And who benefits from fake plastic stuff—aside from, for example, the McDonald's corporation? People all over the world, that's who. The ones who make our crap in rapacious little industrial sectors that manage to combine nineteenth-century factory conditions with twentieth-century materials and manufacturing techniques.

If you stop buying fake stuff—especially fake plastic stuff—then a whole lot of shipments will stop, and hundreds of thousands of warehouses and quasi-factories full of poor, ill-treated workers will shut down. But you won't stop. You can't, because the desire for this stuff has been bred into your children. The only way it will stop is if it's outlawed. But don't worry: fake plastic toys aren't drugs, so it's not as if making them illegal threatens to spawn a bunch of black markets for imitation junk, repackaged in Ziploc bags and offered in dangerous, gang-infested neighborhoods.

Make Drugs Legal

Speaking of gang infestation, legalizing drugs makes a lot of sense. First, you wouldn't have to legalize all drugs. Legalize only the wholesome ones that come from plants. Surely the addictive types would be fully satisfied by a host of selections limited to the products of the poppy plant, coca leaves, and some of the plants that yield hemp. The factories for making fake goods could be replaced, then, by good old-fashioned farms. Afghanistan, for example, would be given back its natural right to supply heroin to its Euro-trash neighbors. Its revenue would be more than high enough to allow it to begin to build decent schools and roadways.

Make Sure People Get the Cars They Need, Not the Ones They Want

The problem with cheap gasoline is that it allows even poor people to buy trucks. Notice that anytime American legislators propose artificially raising the price of gas, their proposals seem to get shot down. That's because you cannot so easily micromanage the economy. Only Alan Greenspan can do that, and he's more or less retired. Instead, use the blunter power of the law. Start by making full-sized pickup trucks and SUVs available only with a permit. The pickups could be had, say, for their usual price plus a twenty-thousand-dollar permit available to licensed contractors only. Then only successful, seasoned contractors would use them. (Rich young people don't generally become contractors.) The young ones or the bad ones would have to cut their teeth without them, learning valuable organization skills and acquiring a head for bookkeeping. SUVs, for their part, could be had for a forty-thousand-dollar off-road permit. This way, the very rich could still have their favorite luxury "cars"—keeping important campaign contributors happy. The remaining 99.5 percent of us would be driving vehicles that would need to get more than 30 mpg overall. But don't worry, this isn't 1980. There's no such thing anymore as a Chevrolet Chevette. Almost all cars these days are good, and building one that will get more than 30 mpg and go more than 100 miles an hours has become a routine matter. (Even some Ford Focus models have managed to achieve such a benchmark and without any particularly persuasive legislation.) And just because you can no longer entertain the idea of a Ford Expedition doesn't mean you can't treat yourself. Get a stick-shift sedan or coupe. Rediscover the joys of true on-road handling. Maybe lose some weight while you're at it. . . .

You should see that what I am proposing is nothing less than a long-needed revision of the market-based economy. The market is everything, yes, and capitalist economies are famous for encouraging levels of innovation unprecedented in human history (giving us mobile telephony and sleek-looking eyeglasses, for example). But that same market, left to its own devices for too long, will eventually bury itself in sheer volumes of unnecessary stuff. Put another way, if consumers are allowed to buy terrible products and listen to very bad music and watch horrible movies and television shows and drive whatever vehicle they choose, they will end by burning up the planet in a mad dash to own the every last individually wrapped product and to become the fattest, laziest people the world has ever seen. In a word, people—and I include myself—have no individual taste and, worse, absolutely no sense of proportion. Matters of taste are one thing, and bad art never killed anyone. But for items that we utilize in one way or another, we are in desperate need of a little arbitration, based not on the whims of legislators, but on the opinions of experts in each field. Just ask a group of top engineers what we should be driving on the highway, for example. Don't leave that decision up to the salespeople who call themselves the management at Ford Motor Company. And ask top-flight, highly educated and experienced parents—in consultation with top-flight environmental and civil engineers—what products should be sold at stores. Don't leave that up to the kids or to the overworked parents who just want them to stop begging them for stuff.

As for what to do with the millions upon millions in the far-flung corners of the developing world who, once the bottom of the market for crap finally dropped out, would suddenly be left with nothing more than an empty pack of American cigarettes, let them figure out something else to do. They could farm a local bit of land, for starters, and it doesn't have to be a drug crop. Better yet, they could recycle all the materials from the disused warehouses and quasi-factories and, while they're at it, practice birth control and take measures to gain local Internet access. Resources everywhere could be re-directed toward education and health care, those two aspects of human life that aren't profitable but which are entirely necessary. If some or even lots of people die along the way, they will have been noble deaths instead of the usual meaningless sacrifices along the road to planetary doomsday.

And don't think that my proposals are all that outlandish or even all that far off. Take cigarettes, for example. They're the quintessential crappy but fun product that people, left to their own devices, grabbed up by the billions and billions, until they were literally choking on them. Well, do you know why cigarettes have been increasingly banned even in lovely places to smoke like the theatres of Scotland, not to mention the pubs of Ireland? That's right: because governments and the people who vote for them have gotten sick and tired of paying out billions of dollars, year after year, for a population of sick and dying smokers. It's pure dollars and cents. So the minute the true costs of unnecessary crap become apparent to everyone, mark my words, you won't be able to make nearly as many silly, reckless, or just plain stupid choices with your hard-earned money.

*I.e., humanity taken as a whole. This is, of course, the era when the hidden costs of an unfettered marketplace, ruled by children, teens, and overworked, undereducated adults, are slowly coming to light.